NY Daily News Honors Cheers by Reposting 1993 Story

(Originally published by the Daily News on May 16, 1993. This story was written by David Bianculli.)

Here are two quick anecdotes, spaced a decade apart, attesting to the excellence of NBC’s “Cheers,” which ends its 11 season run Thursday night.

After the 1982-83 TV season, the Television Critics Association (TCA) polled its members to nominate and acknowledge, for the first time, the best new series on TV. Although the competition that year included much-appreciated “St. Elsewhere,” the runaway winner was a then-little-known sitcom named “Cheers.”

Ten years later, in an interview with Kurt Vonnegut that I was conducting a book called “Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously,” Vonnegut made this appreciative comment about his favorite sitcom:

“I would say that television has produced one comic masterpiece, which is ‘Cheers,’” Vonnegut said. “I wish I’d written that instead of everything I HAD written. Every time anybody opens his or her mouth on-that show, it’s significant. It’s FUNNY.”